Greg Iles - 24 Hours

“This operation takes exactly twenty-four hours. I’m talking from the time Huey and me cranked up this morning. A day’s work for a year ’s pay.” Hickey chuckled. “We’ve got about twenty hours left to go.”

“But why do we have to wait?” The old panic had come back with a vengeance. “If you want money, I’ll get it for you. All you want. Just bring my baby back!”

Hickey shook his had. “I know you would, Karen. But that’s not the way this operation works. Everything’s set up according to a timetable. That way there’s no surprises.”

“But we can’t wait twenty hours!”

“You’d be surprised what you can do for your kid. This is a nice place. We’ll get to know each other a little, have supper, pretend everything’s fine. Abby can watch Huey whittle. Before you know it, I’ll have my money and you’ll have Abby back.”

“Listen to me, you stupid son of a bitch!”

Hickey paled. “You want to watch what you’re saying there, Mom. It’s not smart under the circumstances.”

Karen tried to keep her voice under control. “Sir-Mr. Hickey-if we wait until tomorrow, Abby is going to die.”

His dark eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

“Abby’s a diabetic. A juvenile diabetic. She’ll die without her insulin.”

“Bullshit.”

“My God… didn’t you know that?”

“Talk’s cheap. Let’s see some proof.”

Karen went to a kitchen drawer and pulled out a plastic bag full of orange-capped syringes with 25-gauge needles. She threw the bag onto the table, then opened the refrigerator, where a dozen glass vials waited in compulsively organized rows. She took out a vial of long-acting insulin and tossed it at Hickey.

He caught it and stared at the label. It read: Humulin N. PATIENT: Abigail Jennings. PRESCRIBING PHYSICIAN: Will Jennings, M.D.

“Damn,” Hickey said under his breath. “I don’t believe this.”

“Please,” Karen said in the most submissive voice she could muster. “We must get this medicine to my daughter. She-My God, I didn’t check her sugar when we got home.” Karen felt herself falling again, as though the floor beneath her feet had vanished. “Abby’s due for her shot in an hour. We’ve got to get this to her. How far away is she?”

“We can’t go,” Hickey said in a flat voice.

Karen grabbed the. 38 off the table and pointed it at his chest. “Oh, yes, we can. We’re going right now.”

“I told you about that gun.”

She cocked the revolver. “If Abby doesn’t get her insulin, she’s going to die. Now you do what I say!”

Something flickered in Hickey’s eyes. Amusement. Perhaps surprise. He held up his hands, palms toward Karen. “Take it easy, June. I meant we can’t go yet. Abby’s being transported to a safe place. Maybe we can go later. Tell me about her condition. How critical is it?”

“How critical? She could die.”

“How long before she’s in trouble?”

Karen did the math in her head. If Abby ate only normal food before falling asleep-if she could sleep at all-she could make it through the night. But Karen had no intention of taking that risk. What if Hickey’s cousin fed her candy bars?

“Juvenile diabetics are very unstable,” she said. “If Abby eats too much sugar, she could get in trouble very quickly. She’ll get dehydrated. Then comes abdominal pain and vomiting. Then she’ll go into a coma and die. It can happen very fast.”

Hickey pursed his lips, obviously doing some mental math of his own. Then he reached over the little built-in desk where Karen paid the household bills, hung up the cordless phone, and punched in a new number.

Karen stepped up to the desk and hit the SPEAKER button on the phone. Hickey looked down, trying to figure out how to switch it off, but before he could, a deep male voice said: “Joey? Has it been thirty minutes?”

“No. What happened to ‘hello’?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m sorry.” The man’s voice had an incongruous sound, like the voice of a fifty-year-old child. He’s practically a kid himself, Hickey had said.

“How does the kid look?”

“Okay. She’s still sleeping.”

Karen’s heart thudded. She jerked the gun. “Let me talk to her.”

Hickey warned her back with a flip of his hand.

“Who was that, Joey?”

“Betty Crocker.”

“Give me the phone!” Karen demanded.

“Abby can’t talk right now. She’s sedated.”

Sedated? “You son of a bitch! You-”

Hickey half rose and slugged Karen in the stomach. The breath left her in an explosive rush, and she dropped to the kitchen floor, the gun clattering uselessly in front of her.

“Touch the kid’s chest, Huey. She breathing okay?”

“Kinda shallow. Like a puppy.”

“Okay, that’s fine. Look, don’t give her any candy bars or anything like that. Okay? Maybe some saltines or something.”

“She needs fluids,” Karen gasped from the floor. “Plenty of water!”

“Give her some water. Plenty of water.”

“Saltines and water,” Huey echoed.

“I may be coming out to see you tonight.”

Karen felt a surge of hope.

“That’d be good,” Huey said. “I wouldn’t be so nervous.”

“Yeah. Drive slow, okay?”

“Fifty-five,” Huey said dutifully.

“Good boy.”

Hickey hung up and squatted before Karen. “Here’s the deal. Before we do anything, we have to let my partner make contact with your husband. We’ve got to make sure old Will’s on the same page with us before we move. Because those first few minutes are the shocker. Nobody knows that better than you, right? And with this diabetic thing, he might just flip out. I hope not, because if he does, all the insulin in the world won’t save Abby.” Hickey stood. “We’ll take care of your little girl. It’s just going to take a couple of hours. Now, get up off that floor.”

He offered his hand, but Karen ignored it. She got her knees beneath her and used the edge of the table to pull herself to her feet. The gun remained on the floor.

He walked past her to the opposite wall of the kitchen, where a four-foot-wide framed silk screen hung. It was a semi-abstract rendering of an alligator, brightly colored like a child’s painting, but with the unmistakable strength of genius in it.

“You’ve got paintings by this guy all over your house,” he said. “Right?”

“Yes,” Karen replied, her thoughts on Abby. “Walter Anderson. He’s dead.”

“Worth a lot of money?”

“That silk screen isn’t. I colored it myself. But the watercolors are valuable. Do you want them?”

Hickey laughed. “Want them? I don’t give a shit about ’em. And by morning, you’re going to hate every one. You’re never going to want see another one again.”

He turned from the painting and smiled.

Forty miles south of Jackson, a small, tin-roofed cabin stood in a thick forest of second-growth pine and hardwoods. An old white AMC Rambler rested on cinder blocks in the small clearing, blotched with primer and overgrown by weeds. A few feet away from the Rambler stood a rusting propane tank with a black hose curled over the valve mechanism. Birdcalls echoed through the small clearing, punctuated by the rapid-fire pock-pock-pock of a woodpecker, and gray squirrels chased each other through the upper branches of the oaks.

The animals fell silent. A new sound had entered the woods. A motor. An old one, its valves tapping from unleaded gasoline. The noise grew steadily until the green hood of a pickup truck broke from beneath the trees into dappled sunlight. The truck trundled down the rutted lane and stopped before the cabin porch.

Huey Cotton got out and walked quickly around the hood, the Barbie still sticking out of his pocket. He opened the passenger door and lifted Abby’s limp body off the seat. Cradling her like an infant in his massive arms, he closed the truck’s door with his hip and walked carefully up the porch steps.